# Alexei Leonov Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov (1934–2019) was a Soviet cosmonaut who performed the first spacewalk (extravehicular activity) on March 18, 1965, during the Voskhod 2 mission — another Soviet "first" in the [[Space Race]] that preceded NASA's Ed White spacewalk by less than three months. The EVA nearly killed him and became one of the most harrowing near-disasters in spaceflight history. ## The spacewalk Leonov floated outside the Voskhod 2 spacecraft for approximately 12 minutes, connected by a 5.35-meter tether. In the vacuum of space, his spacesuit ballooned due to internal pressure, becoming so rigid that he could not fit back through the airlock hatch. Facing death, he partially depressurized his suit — risking decompression sickness (the bends) — and forced himself back inside. The reentry was equally dramatic: the automatic landing system failed, and Leonov and his crewmate Pavel Belyayev had to land manually, coming down in a dense forest in the Ural Mountains where they spent two nights in freezing temperatures before rescue teams reached them. The Soviet Union reported the mission as a flawless success — the gap between the official narrative and the actual near-catastrophe is characteristic of Soviet-era information management. ## Later career Leonov was selected to command the Soviet lunar landing mission and trained for it until the N-1 rocket program was cancelled after [[Sergei Korolev]]'s death and repeated launch failures. He later commanded the Soviet crew for the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the handshake-in-orbit mission that symbolically ended the Space Race. He was also a talented artist who painted space scenes from firsthand experience — the only artist to have depicted spaceflight from direct observation. ## See Also - [[Space Race]] — the competition context - [[Sergei Korolev]] — the program director - [[Yuri Gagarin]] — fellow cosmonaut and close friend